The world's top climate scientists have issued their most urgent warning yet about the consequences of global warming, including the imminent risk that the planet is about to cross irreversible tipping points that will threaten its survival.
The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Sixth Assessment Report says climate change is happening now, is accelerating and poses unprecedented threats to human and natural systems and taking swift action can still avoid the worst economic and ecological consequences.
The IPCC report compiles existing studies so that we can view and analyze the bigger picture. Scientific research based on real-world data has increased confidence that the effects of climate change are being felt sooner and more powerfully than predicted.
Some of today's effects are triggering self-reinforcing feedback mechanisms that are causing the Earth to warm. This includes the melting of Arctic sea ice, which in normal times served as a reflective shield, safely bouncing incoming solar radiation back into space. This, in turn, is hastening the release of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide from thawing Arctic permafrost.
Perhaps most dangerously, the self-reinforcing feedbacks can interact, with each one accelerating the others, and collectively, they will soon drive the world past irreversible tipping points. By 2030, planetary warming is expected to surpass the major threshold of 1.5 C.
The good news is that, thanks in large part to President Joe Biden and his climate envoy John Kerry, world leaders are beginning to recognize the climate emergency and recognize the need to take urgent action and throughout the decade to 2030 to keep the temperature goal of 1.5 C.
Numerous studies, including the 2018 IPCC Special Report on 1.5 C and the Climate and Clean Air Coalition's Global Methane Assessment, show that reducing emissions of super-climate pollutants such as methane, hydrofluorocarbons, black carbon soot, and ozone precursors is the quickest way to slow warming in the short term.
Simply reducing methane emissions from the fossil fuel, agriculture and waste industries might prevent up to 0.3 degrees Celsius of warming by the 2040s.
